Advice on impact of personal behaviours for a non-governmental organisation
A guide to the environment impacts of lifestyles, designed to bring the personal behaviour choices of staff within an environmental group in line with the public face of the organisation
Green-Engage Communications argues that people who promote green values or lifestyles should aim to be a good personal example across a broad range of behaviours. Those they communicate with would expect them to be reasonably green in both their professional and personal lives. They wouldn't expect them to be - nor necessarily respect it if they were - obsessive or fundamentalist but they would not be impressed if they thought they were saying one thing and doing something else.
But how green should environmental campaigners be? For those of us who promote environmentally friendly behaviours to the public, it often comes down to the 'Man in the Street Test'. If he were to follow us round and observe our personal lifestyle choices, would he think they were about right, bearing in mind who we were and what our job was? We certainly wouldn't want him to shout "Hypocrite" with a ring of triumph in his voice and it might be damaging also if we were so fussy, so extreme, that he ended up smirking, shaking his head or mentally labelling us as nutters.
In an exercise for an environmental NGO, advisory information on the impacts of personal behaviour was developed to help staff and volunteers make their own, informed, decisions about their lifestyle choices.
This internal advisory document focused on 13 areas of everyday behaviour:
Transport - Holidays, leisure and travel
- Waste
- Food
- Energy
- Chemicals
- Materials and resources
- Water
- Consumer goods
- Savings, banking and mortgages
- Participation
- Voting
- Bearing witness
On food, for example, the personal behaviour guide had this to suggest after discussing the background issues:
- Consider selecting locally produced food where possible and rejecting items from long distance sources.
- Consider buying from your local farmers' market, if there is one.
- Consider re-establishing the link between consumption and seasonal produce rather than demanding year-round supplies of everything.
- Consider maximising consumption of UK-grown organic food.
- If you generally take a car to the shops, consider using internet-based home delivery services.
- If you prefer to use a mainstream supermarket, consider shopping at Waitrose, Co-op or Marks and Spencer, which generally come top of league tables of environmental responsibility. If you use a supermarket, consider putting pressure on the manager through letters for less food miles and more UK-grown organics.
- Consider growing more of your food at home but avoid using peat-based compost. Most garden centres contain good peat-free alternatives.
- Consider avoiding foods you know to contain GM ingredients.
- Consider avoiding fish from stocks at risk from collapse. These include most types of cod, Scottish wild salmon, haddock, plaice, halibut, shark and warm water prawns. The Marine Conservation Society recommends buying skipjack tuna caught by rod and line, mackerel from Cornwall fisheries certified by Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), cod from Icelandic fisheries, Dover sole, Pacific wild salmon or organic farmed salmon, organic farmed trout, organic farmed prawns, mussels, MSC-certified cockles from Wales, herring, kippers, whitebait, anchovies, mullet or turbot.
The organisation for which this information was prepared did not seek to make the advice mandatory for staff, but the information led to greater awareness within the workplace of green consumer issues, more informal discussion 'at the coffee machine' and a degree of development of 'green consciences'.